Orestes In Progress

Roberta Kalechofsky


Publishing Date:   Aug. 3, 2009                                                            paperback                                                                     

5-1/2 X  8-1/2

211 pages

ORESTES IN PROGRESS, by Roberta Kalechofsky, can also be read online at:

 http://www.samizdat.com/micah/orestes.html

ISBN 978-0-916-288-54-9   Once again, the classics furnish a plot, as the family feuds of the Orestiad intersect modern history in this book. The plot is updated to the 20th century,  and  the drama of war is played out on fields of battle and in the family bed.  John Orestes is the golden boy of great expectations who arrives home from college, as Hamlet arrived home,  to discover that his mother has murdered his father, that the exemplary royal family is bogus.  John must now live with an altered reality, as Rabbi Bloom’s family, Holocaust survivors, live with an altered reality and altered perceptions of Europe and of civilization. John flees from his Massachusetts farm home to New York City, “seeking succor,” only to find another level of catastrophe in the lives of those who run the lower-class hotel along the East River,  where he has come to roost.  John’s and Rabbi Bloom’s lives are a collision of destinies played out on the personal and the historical levels. Rabbi Bloom, scholar, and friend of John’s father, is surviving on a mental shoestring. Yet it is to him that John flees, hoping to find an answer to the problem of justice or, at least, a staying power that will allow him to go on living.    The story re-invents the relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as John and Bloom unite in a search for justice.  How would the son of a murderer pursue justice?  What would justice look like for John--or for Rabbi Bloom, whose daughter died in a concentration camp. The answer is given by Bloom’s dog, Aleph, who trumps philosophy and history with his amoral drive for life.  But John and Rabbi Bloom are psychologically exhausted, and their lives and destinies become entwined in a symbolic denouement of Western civilization. Several of Roberta Kalechofsky’s books have been translated into Italian and published in Italy.  This is her eighth work of fiction.  She has spent the last few decades in the animal rights movement and has written several books on that subject.  Please see her website for further information about her work and life: www.micahbooks.com Thank you for reviewing this book and for sending your review to micah@micahbooks.com Orestes In Progress   $17.00